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Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars
Hugh Pickens DOT Com writes "Who says Wikipedians don't have a sense of humor? While perusing Wikipedia I recently came across an article documenting the lamest examples of wikipedia edit wars over the most trivial things. As one wikipedian says: 'Some discussions are born lame; some achieve lameness; some have lameness thrust upon them.' A few of the most amusing examples include: Was Chopin Polish, French, Polish–French, or French–Polish? Can you emigrate from a country of which you are not a citizen? Can you receive citizenship if you already have it? The possibilities for intensive study are endless. Next up, Are U2 an 'Irish band' or simply a band that happen to be from Ireland, since two of their members were born in the UK? A heated discussion took place for over two-and-a-half weeks that resulted in at least one editor getting blocked and many more getting warnings. Next, should members of the Beatles be listed in the 'traditional' order or in alphabetical order? Another edit war which flares up continuously in The Beatles involves whether to identify the band as 'The Beatles' with a capital T or 'the Beatles' with a lower case t. The issue became so contentious it merited an article in the Wall Street Journal. One such installment of this saga was brought before the arbitration committee (by an administrator, no less) where it was quickly declared 'silly.' Next, Is J. K. Rowling's name pronounced like 'rolling' or to rhyme with 'howling'? Rowling is on record claiming she pronounces her name like 'rolling'. An irate editor argues that this is a 'British' pronunciation and the 'American" pronunciation of her name should also be noted. 'This is slightly ridiculous as she is English, and therefore of course will pronounce it in an English manner. Perhaps it rhymes with "Trolling"?' Finally did Jimmy Wales found Wikipedia or co-found it? 'Not surprisingly, those who actually were around at the time and know the answer stayed far away from this one. The casualty list has yet to be compiled, but no doubt editor egos will be among the worst hit.'"
Or do we really not have that kind of time?
Sometimes people don't think too far past the end of their noses. I mean they don't pronounce bowling like howling in the U.S. so it shouldn't be much of a stretch to pronounce Rowling like bowling instead of howling. sheesh.
I read Slashdot for the headlines, because the headlines, unlike the articles, are usually original and never duplicated
I regularly replace misspelled "aluminum" with the correct "aluminium" whenever I see it in an article, but backwards people just revert my changes.
Signature intentionally left blank.
I gave up on being a Wikipedia editor a long time ago, what a waste of time trying to be helpful and make the articles better. Even doing a simple edit like "its" for an incorrect "it's" got nasty emails sent to be almost immediately about it, and the edits reverted in no time. All I ever wanted to do was correct minor grammatical and typographical errors, which never would have gotten past an editor in a "real" encyclopedia, and make for better looking articles. The grief I got for it..., well, it wasn't much fun. They want editors, they get them, the editors give up in disgust. It's also why I haven't given them a dime.
Everything2 was what Wikipedia should have been. Much better class of people there.
-> I dislike sigs...
Namely, this was in the page for Desiree Washington, the woman that Mike Tyson was convicted of raping.
In the section about the rape accusation, trial and conviction of Mike Tyson, I added information about a previous false allegation made by Ms. Washington against a high school friend.
Someone reverted my change with a cryptic comment about "BLP". I saw it a few days later and re-created my change. Again, my change was reverted with more comments about "BLP".
This was several years ago so I don't remember exactly what was said back and forth but the gist of it is that the other party thought that there was something in the wikipedia rules about the "Biographies of Living Persons" that prevented me from including the information about the false rape allegations Desiree Washington made in the past. I challenged the person to show specifically where BLP precluded me from including this information, they could not so I restored my change.
Apparently this other editor had wikipedia political connections because I received a "Warning" for making my edits. I was willing to be banned over this because for me it's about the principle of the thing. If wikipedia is a free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, I was going to make sure that this factual information was included. Hell, I can generate throw-away email addresses and wikipedia accounts. I'm not sure who resolved this but what happened in the end was that Desiree Washington's page went away and the information about the false rape allegations in her past were included on Mike Tyson's page.
After this, I stopped editing articles. I realized that situations like this are precisely why wikipedia isn't considered an authoritative source in the academic sense. People with more knowledge about a subject and with the supporting documentation can lose edit wars if the ignoramus on the other side has the political clout to have them blocked.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Wikipedia has become staffed with a sizeable number of edit trolls, who know a lot about a tiny slice of something, and think that gives them great and wise moral authority over the entire domain...somewhat like real academia. I found this out the hard way when I made an edit to an article, which was modest, relevant, and neutral in tone. Immediately, it got removed by someone who left a mini-screed about it. I checked the person's history and found that they had numerous arguments with other users, but apparently still retained their account because they managed to effectively play rules lawyer with Wikipedia's policies. Again, like real academia. That said, articles like this make me cringe, because it a) turns people off of what is really an excellent resource, and b) makes Wikipedia sound like it is somehow less worthy than traditional reference sources (where no one sees the bile and acrimony that goes into the production of some of those works). It's like anything, some people are bound and determined to play the chemically imbalanced turd in the punchbowl.
One of the big underlying problems seems to be that when someone is a big contributor of some article, he ends up guarding it and the article just "feels wrong" to him when someone else modifies it, even if the contributions would objectively make sense. Let the information evolve and the words be shuffled around, it's not your precious snowflake thesis...
I'd been contributing to an article on a film. We'd sourced plenty of material and it was a really in-depth affair.
Then some ding-dong undergraduate deleted it and substituted his own 35,000 word essay. This boring shot-by-shot description written in stiff prose and sprinkled with gems from the thesaurus undid a year of work and good luck trying to get it repealed because his school buddies have plenty of time to wage an edit war when the rest of us are at work.
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
It's got nothing to do with Wikipedia and everything to do with
1. How people how argue and more specifically
2. What pedants argue about.
You want to argue about who's going to win the Super Bowl or be purged next in North Korea? Lots of good arguments and at the end, there is an actual measurable outcome.
Want to argue about which is the best operating system? Lots of arguing there but no measurable outcome. You can measure which is the most popular but that's like saying the most popular music is the best music. We argue about music and art.
But the arguments over word use and definitions of fact are the most vociferous because they are the most picky. And only picky, anal retentive types will argue so the arguments get more and more precise each time. When done well, we call it science.
But it's hard to use words and syntax well when arguing about word definitions and syntax. If you see no difference between French-Polish and Polish-French, well then there's no difference between African-American and American-African. It actually is debatable. Uninteresting to most but debatable to many.
Your right about that. I always corrected minor errors and its really annoying when people keep on changing them back irregardless of weather their correct or knot.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
I can't decide if I should be thrilled that we have achieved some kind of intellectual enlightened society evidenced by our capacity to be pedantic in a globally connected ecosystem of information, or appalled that people don't have better things to do with their time.
Perhaps we should have a discussion about this. On-line.
I am not interested in articles about life extension advancements.
1. Chopin was Prussian.
2. You can only emigrate from a countrybefore receiving citizenship while already being a citizen.
3. U2 are a UK band with Irish members.
4. It should be capitalized with a capital T as such: "the BeaTles".
5. J.K. Rowling's last name is pronounced "roo-ling".
6. Jimmy Wales co-opted Wikipedia.
Now can we finally stop the edit-wars?
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They evade their taxes in the Netherlands, so it's a Dutch band.
Privacy is terrorism.
I lost it after an article I'd written, putting a fair bit of work into, was stolen and placed on another website. An editor found this site and accused me of copyvio and then refused to simply compare timestamps. No-one has ever apologised, despite ample opportunity, and until they do, I refuse to waste my time on it.
[FUCK BETA]
Just try editing a Wikipedia article introduce a deliberate mistake and see what happens :)
Worth mentioning that, in seriousness, you should never do this. It's Wikipedia vandalism, and waste's everyone's time.
Instead you could just find a Wikipedia edit which corrected an error, and backtrack to see for how long that error was present on Wikipedia. No vandalism necessary.
It's definitely news for nerds though. Only someone truly nerdy enough would actually give a damn.
I stopped giving a damn and I stopped contributing to Wikipedia. The few times I tried to add information, sources and all, my changes got reverted by some wikidiot that didn't like how I changed things.
They're complaining about not having money and begging for it with their own banner ads at the top; stop running the site like an unmoderated debating web forum and perhaps people will be more inclined to participate and to give money. That may mean having *gasp* an actual editorial staff, and cutting the wikidiots from edit privileges when they nitpick things that don't mean anything.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Further, here is some discussion on just this topic.
(I could've sworn there was an official mention of this on Wikipedia itself, but I can't find one.)
Ask not for whom the wind whooshes, it whooshes for thee.